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Sarah Palin: Smart, Scrappy, and, Oh Yes, Sexy

Give that to Governor Sarah Palin, and perhaps a good deal more. She electrified the delegates in the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul on Wednesday night, priming them—at last—to accept John McCain not as the suspect, maverick, Kennedy-coddling wild-card they had resisted for so long, but as the nominee for whom she herself had vouched.

"This world of threats and dangers, it's not just a community, and it doesn't need an organizer," Palin proclaimed, in a casual, seamless, painless putdown of Barack Obama's first calling. "Let us face the matter squarely: There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you … in places where winning means survival, and defeat means death, and that man is John McCain."It was a bravura performance, in which the heretofore almost unknown Alaska governor not only raised the roof with her partisans here, but, I suspect, came across as smart, scrappy, sharp, serious—and, yes, sexy—to the viewers at home. "The difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?" Palin asked at one point, before answering herself: "Lipstick!" It was not a line that a paid speechwriter seemed likely to have devised.

Palin's self-evident authenticity may or may not have been enough to inoculate her from the parallel narrative that has prevailed here all week, and that erupted with particular and unexpected force today when two of the GOP's savviest hands—the Reagan-Bush I speechwriter Peggy Noonan and the former McCain consultant Mike Murphy—were caught on MSNBC microphones they thought were dead declaring that Palin's candidacy might well be, too. They merely echoed what are widely assumed to be the private thoughts of many professional Republicans, including some of McCain's own close aides.

But all that hardly mattered, here in the hall. So what if Palin has laughably limited experience for the job she would presume to fill? Her winning way and obvious common sense, and—it must be acknowledged—her ability to deliver killer barb after barb with folksy kindness, diffidence, and devastating aim, carried the day. Her speech (reportedly devised in part by the veteran Bush II speechwriter Matthew Scully) was full of elegant Ted Sorensen inversions: Obama has used change to promote his career while McCain has used his career to promote change. For a season, Obama has inspired with his words, but for a lifetime, McCain has inspired with his deeds. You get the point.

Palin was preceded by Rudy Giuliani, perhaps the meanest, most unpleasant public figure I have ever come to know in 26 years of covering politics. His own candidacy for president cratered with the very crowd that embraced him with such huzzahs Wednesday night, but it must be said that he, too, wowed them in the hall (even if I suspect his serial invective was less effective in living rooms around the land). When he began by declaring that Barack Obama had been a community organizer, the reaction in the arena suggested that Obama had been a child abuser, or perhaps merely a clown. People actually hissed and hollered at hooted at the thought that a grown man would take such a job. It was a bit scary.

Perhaps the richest moment in Giuliani's screed came when he self-righteously demanded: "How dare they question whether Sarah Palin has enough time to spend with her children and be vice president? How dare they do that? When do they they ever ask a man that question? When?" Coming from a man who is more or less openly estranged from the children of his second marriage on account of the complications of his third, that's pretty much a losing question. (Leave aside Mitt Romney's earlier attack on promiscuity, in a convention at which the pregnancy of Palin's 17-year-old unwed daughter, Bristol, has been an unwelcome sideshow).

Sarah Palin passed her first test, but there are many more to come (including trial by Biden, or "Anything you can say, I can say longer!") It remains to be seen whether she will, ultimately, help or hurt the Republican ticket. But I came away from the evening feeling fairly sure that the night's big winner was McCain. When he finally appeared on the rostrum at the end of the festivities, with the crowd well-primed by Palin, the delegates, so many of whom were decidedly mild about him lo these many months, and even when the convention began, seemed at last to embrace him as one of their own.

As McCain made his way down the line of assembled Palins, to shake their hands or kiss their cheeks, depending on gender, he gently touched Palin's 5-month old son, Trig, who suffers from Down's syndrome and who, moments before, Palin had held close to her breast, silently mouthing, "My baby." Even on the somewhat blurry giant video screens in the hall, it was evident, in close-up, that Trig's face—sweet, open, and searching, as any baby's would be—was nevertheless that of a baby with needs now called special but once called cursed. For any late-in-life parent who has ever sweated out an amniocentesis, it was a moment of searing sobriety.

"Don't you think we made the right choice?" McCain asked the crowd, which responded with a roar.

It made me think of one of the old jokes McCain invariably uses to begin his speeches. I've never known how much of it is truth, and how much is metaphor, but here is the gist: McCain is newly elected to the Senate, and one of his steadfast supporters in Arizona telephones to tell him that her municipal garbage collection has been summarily shifted to a different day, one that interferes with her ability to volunteer at the local Republican central committee. When McCain suggests that she might complain to the local mayor, she avers, "I wouldn't want to bother an important person like that!"

It seems all but certain that in choosing the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska (population circa 5,000), to be his running mate, McCain has met and married the single most important person of his political life. Whether they win or lose, it seems (at least) tonight, may well depend on her.